The Boyz on Kingdom Was a Sloppy Sob Story
Where the writing is 72pt on the wall and he who wears the crown has to bear its weight no matter what
When I look at the reception to Mnet's Kingdom - a reality competition show in which six Kpop boygroup contestants battle for the title of the "king" and a week of a variety show - the voting and placement system takes center stage across fans, as well as a lot of gratitude for the interactions between groups. (Here is a good overview of it, though feel free to browse the r/MnetKingdom subreddit for post-show episode discussions also) Watching and keeping up with fans week by week, I noticed some people even enjoyed the little lead-ins to the performances each group got (which ballooned the show to its ninety-minute length per episode to begin with). Good for them. I was bored by those segments. I didn't care for the other contestants - sure, I learned a few names, I watched their performances, but by the filler sports day episode and the unit group announcement I just felt like my time was wasted here. I cared about one contestant and their performances only: The Boyz. I suppose I may well be alone in this particular kind of tunnel vision. Looking at The Boyz' fandom though, I know I'm not alone in feeling bitter.
To backtrack: The Boyz is an eleven-membered group that originally debuted with twelve members, one of which - Ju Haknyeon - has ranked nineteenth on the second season of Produce 101. Prior to Road to Kingdom, they were a B-list boyband: not too well-known, but not total nobodies. As typical for a lot of Kpop boygroups, they too had their bright-to-mature pipeline, but their focus on choreography and lack of "noise" songs recalls an older generation, namely Infinite, SHINee and a bit of EXO (the latter of which they've covered extensively). On March 5 2020, just a month after recent comeback Reveal, Joy News 24 reported that The Boyz was in talks to be one of the contestants of the boygroup spin-off of Mnet's Queendom in 2019, Road to Kingdom. The idea was that in the first half of 2020, the competition program Road to Kingdom would determine the lucky winner that would enter the "main show", Kingdom, planned to air in the second half of the year. From the first intro moment Sword of Victory on, it's clear The Boyz is a clear frontrunner. The choreography is intricate, every member a knife-sharp dancer, and the stunts help. For future rounds, they even add an overarching storyline to their fantastic dancing. A crown that gets stolen in Danger, a king that loses his position in Reveal - Catching Fire, only for a new one to rise by moonlight: like the chess they were playing on final performance Checkmate, they were vastly outpacing their checker-playing rivals. They would go on to win this show, almost always placing first on the rounds, scoring a near-perfect 95765 points in total. The one time they placed last? It was the collaborative round, hilariously enough loosely following an idol's life from a dream to audition to the final stage. Coverage about their win in RtK follows, including international publications extending all the way to the following (and most recent) comeback,The Stealer. Even if their member Sunwoo said that ranks are secondary to performing for the people you love, no doubt The Boyz reaped the results from winning.
Going into Kingdom, the group was now interested in intensifying the narrative aspect of the performances. Guided by Game of Thrones, and hinted on as early as the Mnet Asian Music Awards (MAMA) in December 2020 - which included a segment of main dancer Juyeon having a dance-off with Hyunjin (Stray Kids) and San (ATEEZ) - every performance was ostensibly about the story of newly crowned king Juyeon as he was revived (No Air (A Song of Fire and Ice)), lost his love (O Sole Mio (The Red Wedding)) only to be reborn (Monster (Stormborn)) to the apocalypse (Kingdom Come), all teased through the introduction stage The Stealer Epic Version. Watching the performances without any other commentary, I would say it's with Monster that this conceit falls apart in favor of a "powerful" performance. In it, the eleven members dance to a horrendous arrangement of EXO's Monster that takes every velocity out of the original, including a nonsensically placed dance break, and then there's a giant shimmering snake from which member Sunwoo comes out. More dancing. We watch crew members turn the giant snake's head. Then The Boyz stand coolly, doing the final moves to the song. End. In order to make up for injured members Kevin, Ju Haknyeon, and Younghoon, the following and final performance Kingdom Come features VCR performances, but it isn't enough to save the stage from thematically going nowhere. It looks grand, the members look good and the dancing is on point, but there's no sense of cleverness and actual closure that Checkmate had, because the Juyeon-centered plot was completely abandoned.
But if you were to ask Kingdom, not the performance bits but everything leading up to and after the fact, the low point started... from the start. In Episode 2, leader Sangyeon asks "Should we become the circus [for Kingdom]?" Multiple members mention disappointment at placing second in the introduction round, and it leads them to place third for their performance of No Air the next round. As a review of Round 1's No Air and before O Sole Mio's performance, a critic writes Perhaps the pressure of winning Road to Kingdom was the cause. It was a disappointing performance for the fans who would have expected more1. The "more" does a lot of work here, particularly into the direction of nowhere. Still, as if it was sage advice, main dancer Q says: "I don't know how to outdo our past performances." In the same episode, Juyeon says: "We're at a crosspoint we haven't been before." RtK members have to come to the rescue to console The Boyz, and the arc resolves with: "I don't think we need to feel burdened about [placements] and stress out." O Sole Mio lands last inexpert and self evaluation. But since they were consoled by the people they've crushed before — I mean, friends — The Boyz now cheer at being last overall and openly joke about it: "We're six levels underground," Sunwoo says in Round 3, "We need to climb up." But nobody seems burdened on a sunny spring day at the Han River. For that matter, the first footage of The Boyz actually practicing is Episode 9... of 10.
What is the expert and self evaluation, anyway? Even though Mnet revealed the expert panel - a group of performers, producers, and music distribution platform workers - as we never got to hear the reasoning of the teams why they voted this or that team, it seemed more like screenwriting. And doesn't it make sense? From a writerly perspective, all of Road to Kingdom makes such a potent ghost that not using that for Kingdom would be a waste, practically yelling for a "big fish in a small pond" moment that The Boyz got their fill of. Billed from the start as having to bear the weight by Mnet (Qui fert pondus coronae velit the introduction video read in fancy Latin, "the one who wears the crown should bear its weight"2), it was obvious that The Boyz had a tall bar to clear. Working nonstop on a high-concept performance for three months is stressful (you can see members mention that in practice videos that were released after the show, such as here). That they would be judged for past performances unlike all the other contestants was always going to weigh against The Boyz regardless of writing. Mistakes happen; Juyeon says as much in Episode 1, Sangyeon makes a mistake for the second round (O Sole Mio) that, had nobody not mentioned it, no one would've noticed. The only work the episode writers had to do was to ramp already existing elements up. Fine, it's the name of the game, but in that case let's not lie. I don't enjoy watching screenwriters tell me good performances were bad or subpar, or not more compared to Road to Kingdom. No Air was grander than a wall and a table for Danger in RtK, and the only flaw of that performance was its horrible arrangement. Nothing more, nothing less.
Maybe I watched it all wrong. Maybe Kingdom, like Queendom before it, was more about my favorites interacting with other groups. But if that's the case, it didn't happen for five episodes. I had to watch five episodes of my favorite boyband being drab and sad. And the sixth was a filler episode. Other groups that I'm not a fan of got bits of practice or playing around prior to their performance. Not The Boyz. When it came to The Boyz, Kingdom seemed hellbent on constructing the most obstuse, unwatchable arc possible. Maybe some of that has to do with disagreements between Mnet and The Boyz' management company Creker; I don't know. In the end, with a placement history of 2nd-3rd-6th-4th-5th and placing second at the very end, I have got to wonder why we were subjected to this in the first place. I even suspect the notion that this is solely based on votes (though majorly related to it): the overall top three of Kingdom were the same three groups that competed for the crown in the MAMA performance. He who wore the crown couldn't bear its weight: the writing was always on the wall. But still: if me watching my favorites is watching it wrong as well, given this ridiculous sob story, then I struggle figuring out what the right way of watching it is. Objectively suffering myself through 90 minute episodes (and a three hour finale) for the "trials" and "tribulations" and performances Korean pop boybands? Perhaps you can think of me as a hypocrite for enjoying a winner’s edit on RtK even though the same spotty writing is in effect, but the performances on RtK were frankly undeniable. Kingdom’s weren’t as great, this is true, but I would’ve enjoyed seeing an arc that came closer to the truth than this badly done dramatized nonsense. If I had wanted the latter, I’d have watched any Turkish drama.
The Boyz members now mention comeback preparations; I predict a new release to happen sometime in August, just for summer. Several members now ranked on on the recent brand endorsement rankings for June (essentially, a list of who is the most bankable star). Appearing on a show such as Kingdom always brings a surge in attention due to screentime, and we will see a translation on this in every aspect of The Boyz' next actions - album sales, concert tickets, member appearances on other television shows, brand endorsements. Soon Kingdom will only be a minor blip in their career, a nasty pimple I’m glad has now been popped. “I didn’t know I would participate three times in survival programs,” Ju Haknyeon writes on the paid app Universe to fans. “There won’t be a fourth time, right?” Better not, Haknyeon.
According to http://latindiscussion.com/forum/threads/the-one-who-wants-to-wear-the-crown-bear-its-weight.30822/, the poster mentions that this popular phrase among Koreans is an “abomination”, and doesn’t actually mean this English translation. Google Translate returns “branch that does bear the weight of the crown he wishes to”, so I’m willing to believe them.
Reading this I can understand your frustration of watching the group you love go through this show it honestly to me sound like a waste of their time. although, like you said some positive comes along with more exposure, new fans that increase their sales, and standing in the public. It is fascinating still to see the machine at work how the showrunners edit the clips together to tell the story they want and how it is achieved. It is something we see time and time again for any competition or "reality" show. I hope especially for Hanknyeon's sake this is the last time he has to go through something like this.
It is interesting reading about this as someone who has listened to kpop for about 8 years now my enjoyment of it had always been limited to listening to music, watching the videos, and watching interviews or clips of segments of my favorite groups on variety shows. So I never fully committed to watching a competition show to see how they fare against the others. hopefully, their upcoming comeback works to put this show behind them and people could focus on the stars they are.
the boyz are the moment i fear, and kingdom knew that and tried to deny it!